TankSpot's Guide to Halfus Wyrmbreaker

Hello and welcome to the Bastion of Twilight Raid Guide! My name is Aliena, and in this video I'll show you all you have to know about Halfus Wyrmbreaker, the first boss you'll encounter in this instance. We completed this fight with 2 tanks, 6 healers and 17 DPS, but similar raid compositions may work just as well. This encounter has a 6 minute enrage timer.

As soon as you walk up to Halfus' room, you'll notice several dragonkin around him that you can interact with. The available dragons change from week to week, and you'll need them to defeat Halfus, cause he doesn't fight alone. As soon as you pull him, a Proto-Behemoth will come to his aid. Halfus' and the drakes abilities change depending on which dragons you have available.

Storm Rider allows Halfus to cast Shadow Nova. Nether Scion gives Halfus a Frenzy. Slate Dragon gives him a long stun. Time Warden allows his Proto-Dragon to cast Fireballs. Whelps give the Proto-Drake a Fire Breath. Always enable all three drakes over the course of the encounter to counter these abilities and do additional dramage to Halfus, no matter which you have up.

Shadow Nova deals moderate damage and knocks every person in the raid back. Its cast is pretty much instant, but this is where the Storm Rider comes in. Releasing him from his cage will cause him to be mind-controlled by Halfus and attack your raid, but it will also make his Shadow Nova interruptable.

Releasing the Time Warden will also cause him to be mind-controlled and attack you, but it'll greatly slow down the speed of the Behemoth's fire balls which makes them easily avoidable, in turn making your raid take a lot less damage. Lastly, releasing the whelp cage will - yep, you guessed it - cause them to be mind-controlled and attack your raid, but will also reduce damage done to your raid from the boss & drakes.

So, what's the plan here? You should release the two most menacing dragons straight away - in our case Storm Rider and Time Warden - and have your tanks secure them. We had our main tank tank both Halfus and the Time Warden and our Offtank took care of the Storm Rider. Ranged DPS then took down the Storm Rider while melee DPS stayed on Halfus to interrupt Shadow Nova. It's a good idea to set up an interrupt chain if you have a Storm Rider.

When the first dragon died, we released our third pick, the whelp cage. There's no need to actively kill the whelps, they don't do much damage at all. Keep them in cleave range and they'll die eventually. At 50% Halfus gains another ability that he'll use every 30 seconds - Furious Roar.

Furious roar will execute 3 stuns in quick succession. You're able to move a little between each stun, but you're NOT able to use any abilities. You can and should move out of fireballs between stuns. Your tank should have a cooldown up before every furious roar or he's very likely to die during it. After the stuns, Halfus will immediately cast Shadow Nova which must be interrupted.

To do this, mages can blink the last tick of Furious Roar and counterspell or you can use things such as Hand of Protection and PVP trinkets. Set up a rotation and make sure to only break the third stun, if you do it earlier you'll just get stunned again.

It's a good idea to use Bloodlust after the dragons are dead but before you hit 50%, when all DPS are focusing on Halfus as that should give you the maximum amount of DPS on him. Until the gear level rises, you're likely to need it.

That's all the mechanics to this fight. I'll attach a video of the full encounter so you can see how we handled the various mechanics. As a note, when we defeated this encounter we were not yet aware that we cannot use cooldowns between Furious Roar ticks, so that resulted in multiple tank and some DPS deaths and ultimately almost cost us the fight here.

The enrage timer is somewhat harsh if your raid is still undergeared, but if you execute the encounter correctly, it's definitely doable. Good luck and have fun!